Michał Śledziński, from the "Katalog wypadków" exhibition, courtesy of Galeria Zderzak
The display at Kraków’s Zderzak gallery crowns Kuba Woynarowski’s Orbis Pictus project, aimed at finding connections between cartoon drawings and contemporary art
The artists invited to take part in the exhibition were asked to tackle the history of contemporary art. The idea was first triggered by two comic books, one created by Przemek Truściński - a visual reportage from the exhibition of Wilhelm Sasnal paintings in the Zachęta gallery in Warsaw, and another one about Andy Warhol produced by Tymek Jezierski and Monika Powalisz.
Kuba Woynarowski comments:
Truściński created an intelligent though somewhat mean little study about the reception of contemporary art in today’s society, while Jezierski and Powalisz conjured up a fairy-tale like narrative, alluding to the cliché of an artist seen as ‘alien’, unassimilated to reality. These two works, a realistic and a somewhat surrealist one - a critical as well as an affirmative stance – have formed the framework for this exhibition
Alex Kłoś, Tomasz Kwaśniewski (story.), Przemysław Truściński (illustration.), part of the "Katalog wypadków" exhibition, courtesy of Galeria Zderza
Some of Poland’s most recognisable cartoon artists have been invited to take part in the show: Przemek Truściński, Krzysztof Gawronkiewicz, Dennis Wojda, Michał Śledziński and Janek Koza, as well as the Maszin collective. Other artists whose names are more frequently associated with illustration or design are also presenting their work in Zderzak: Tymek Jezierski, Patryk Mogilnicki, Victor Soma, and Mariusz Libel.
Woynarowski explains:
I wanted to confront numerous perspectives and ways of perceiving art (from the private one to the universal), and many different styles (from realism to abstraction). But an element that is uniting in all the pieces is certainly the presence of a sense of humour – which can be a bold one but is also at times very subtle. [...] The exhibition presents cartoon questionnaires, recordings of performance art pieces, and visual essays. All of these are exemplary of the many possibilities that comics offer with regard to art.
The exhibition continues a tradition of comics commentaries on the artworld, represented by such international artists as Dan Perjovschi and Adam Dant, and in Poland by Wilhelm Sasnal, Marcin Maciejowski and Pola Dwurnik.
Janek Koza, a part of the "Katalog wypadków" exhibition, courtesy of Galeria Zderzak
Woynarowski fits the exhibition within the gallery space, and tries to discern visual analogies between the comics and themes they take up such as “the private life of the artists” or “the end of art”. Frames with comic books in different formats are scattered across the colourful walls of the gallery, forming a giant puzzle. The gallery walls also have drawings and geometric elements mounted directly on them, as if they were frames for some of the conveyed stories. A table is mounted in the center, with a concept-map of the presentation that brings together quotes from the exhibited works as a new whole. It’s a theoretical reflection, realised through visual media rather than text.
I came up with the idea of depicting thoughts that occur in the head of a curator in the form of a cartoon diagram, slightly evocative in its form of hypertexual works by Chris Ware. A cartoon thought-map conceived of in this manner would include fragments of the presented works and point to the possible connections and frictions between them. Although I am not giving up the idea of a curator’s text, within the visual “map” I would like to employ first of all a visual language.
Author: Łukasz Chmielewski, translated by Paulina Schlosser, 28.05.2013